Leaders at full-service life sciences commercialization partner TrialCard are committed to carving out a clear path from prescription to patient — they know better experiences lead to better outcomes. That’s why they’ve spent several years expanding and perfecting TrialCard’s services, so patients can more easily access the care they deserve. It’s how TrialCard makes sure patients come first, every day.

Despite that progress, TrialCard’s 800-person contact center still didn’t have a fully functional workforce management (WFM) department — most contact center employees, in fact, weren’t even familiar with the concept. But contact center leaders knew real-time WFM was exactly what was needed if the center were to continue its important job of helping patients secure faster access to — and affordable pricing for — their medications.

But it wasn’t going to be easy. TrialCard’s contact center is designed so that each client essentially runs its own customer service operations under the TrialCard umbrella. As a result, leaders knew they had to find a cloud-based WFM platform that could give them the robust functionality they needed while also supporting this complex scenario — and impressing even their most vocal, internal WFM skeptics.

After selecting and implementing Calabrio WFM, TrialCard’s newly formed WFM team executed a thoughtful plan to gain the internal buy-in they knew would be critical to the initiative’s long-term success.

First, they showed leaders how powerful and easy Calabrio was to use. Then, using before-and-after data, they worked one at a time with each contact center team to create a customized plan each leader could use to monitor their agents’ performance and team’s success.

Now, TrialCard’s WFM team relies upon Calabrio’s real-time monitoring, reporting and agent scheduling capabilities to build accurate and complete contact center schedules based upon historical performance. WFM planners easily create multiple options to address all inbound, outbound and back-office work —tailored systems that seamlessly support a varying degree of schedules, staffing needs and role types across each contact center team to ensure someone’s always available to assist patients.

Thanks to Calabrio, TrialCard agents enjoy more flexible schedules backed by a modern WFM strategy. Each contact center team now monitors its progress against standard quality, agent adherence, utilization and occupancy KPIs via a user-friendly Calabrio interface also visible to the leadership team.

Leaders also now maintain deeper relationships with other TrialCard departments — like sales and marketing — that are pivotal to the long-term success of their contact center business. Greater sharing of data, for instance, enables more departments to plan more efficiently and ensure key stakeholders are aware of potential impacts to their teams.

Migrating Calabrio to the cloud enabled leaders at TrialCard to position their contact center to grow and expand more cost-effectively. They’re also realizing additional WFM benefits. Their forecasts are even more accurate, for instance, because they can customize shrinkage for each separate queue. They also can build customized reports and run powerful analytics on contact center data.

Calabrio WFM also helped leaders quickly ensure the safety and well-being of their contact center employees when COVID-19 hit in 2020 — despite the increased demand for TrialCard’s services and solutions it caused. Contact center leaders used Calabrio WFM to easily identify the best ways to provide flexible scheduling opportunities to agents working from home, and remotely monitor and evaluate their performance. Merely two weeks after the CDC declared a pandemic, TrialCard’s business continuity plan was complete: all employees were working remotely and continuing to support TrialCard patients and its life science partners.

As contact center agents continue to work remotely today, they enjoy a significantly increased level of engagement with TrialCard’s leadership teams — collaboration which fosters ongoing customer commitment and enables them to be more proactive when challenges arise.